


It Goes

by trenchcoatsanddragons



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-30
Updated: 2017-09-30
Packaged: 2019-01-07 03:39:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12224985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trenchcoatsanddragons/pseuds/trenchcoatsanddragons





	It Goes

It takes a while, for Cas to adjust to human life again. It’s faster this time around, having gone through the process before, but falling into humanity and rising into it from the dead turn out to be different experiences. The learning curve is less steep -- Cas already knows how to brush his teeth, what temperature the shower should be, what kind of jam he likes on his sandwiches. But the learning how to walk again, that’s new. And the few terrifying seconds he forgets how to breathe, those are new, too. But he knows his way back to the bunker from every corner of the continental US. That would be impossible to forget.

The first week is as strange as it always is when one of them comes back from a brief hiatus spent in the afterlife, but it’s gentler, somehow. There’s more soup and less whiskey, more movies and less spell casting. There’s more Dean, less loneliness, for what seems like the first time in forever.

Sam’s time is often taken up by the child, but he still makes time in the morning to ask how Cas is doing, how he slept. Cas joins him on sunrise runs into town when he feels up to it, but most days he sleeps until Dean wakes him mid morning with a cup of coffee and a concerned smile on his face. Cas feels vulnerable at first, like his skin is too soft, too raw, too human in the mornings to share a space with Dean. But Dean starts bringing coffee, and then it’s toast with Cas’s favorite jam. For the first few days he just comes to wake Cas up, leaves breakfast on the nightstand and asks if Cas is comfortable. He eventually starts staying throughout the morning, hunkering down in an arm chair in the corner with a book or a laptop, never with any breakfast of his own. There are no excuses, no questions. Cas eats, Dean reads. They don’t talk much, there isn’t need to. A common understanding hangs between them, falling into the spaces between the crumbs of Cas’s toast and the pages of Dean’s books (he picks up Vonnegut stories from the Lebanon library. Breakfast of Champions, Mother Night, even Jailbird). The two of them suddenly have time. For once. No need for bruised confessions or bloody desperation. Cas eats, Dean reads.

After the first week, Dean comes in one morning, around eleven like always. With him comes a nervous energy that Cas hasn’t felt since his first day back from wherever his pseudo-soul must’ve gone when he was dead. Dean smiles, like always, but the coffee mug shakes a little in his hand as he braces his shoulder against the door frame. He just stands there for a moment, staring at Cas in a strange role-reversal that neither of them mentions. He suddenly seems to realize he’s still holding the coffee and sets it down on the nightstand, staring at Cas all the while. He goes to the arm chair but doesn’t sit, taps his fingers against his thigh for a few beats. Cas picks up the coffee, curling his fingers around the warmth, busying himself with not spilling it on the sheets Dean had found and washed and made for him.

“I love you, you know”. It seems to fall out of Dean’s mouth, spilled over the edge by that nervous energy. Cas’s coffee remains soundly in its mug, still. There’s silence, and Dean’s eyes widen quickly. The words fall out again, “Oh god, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry”. Dean stumbles back into the armchair and drops Slapstick onto the concrete floor.  
Cas sits up for the first time all day, puts the coffee back down.  
“So it goes”, Cas says.

It takes a while, for Cas to adjust to life with Dean. But it’s faster this time around.


End file.
